Main Point:

In a PLOS Medicine guest editorial, Paul Glasziou, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University in Australia, explores how open access publications could help moderate and reduce the vast waste of global medical research.

Published in:

PLOS Medicine

Study Further:

Continuing on from his previous work, which highlighted how most of the world’s expenditure on medical research was thrown away, Glasziou outlines how bad the situation is and suggests how it might be improved. Subscription-based academic journals make money by through copyrights assigned by authors to publishers who lock the articles behind paywalls. Open access models, in which journals charge a publication fee and then make research and related content fully and immediately available to all, stand to aid the dissemination of knowledge and to improve its quality. Continue reading Making research findings freely available is an essential aid to medical progress→

Main Point:

Dive guides monitoring sharks on coral reef at similar level to telemetry.

Published in:

PLOS ONE

Study Further:

Shark data collected by citizen scientists may be as reliable as data collected using automated tools, according to results published April 23, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Gabriel Vianna from The University of Western Australia and colleagues.

Shark populations are declining globally, and scientists lack data to estimate the conservation status of populations for many shark species. Citizen science may be a useful and cost-effective means to increase knowledge of shark populations on coral reefs, but scientists do not yet know enough about how data collected by untrained observers compares to results from traditional research methods. To better understand the reliability of datasets collected by citizen science initiatives, researchers in this study compared reef shark sightings counted by experienced dive guides (citizen scientists), with data collected from tagged reef sharks by an automated tracking tool (acoustic telemetry). 62 dive guides collected data during over 2,300 dives using standardized research protocols, including reporting on the dive site, date, species, counts, estimated depth, current, visibility, and number of tourist divers in the group. Both data sets were collected at coral reefs on the Pacific island of Palau over a period of five years.

This report has presented 7 highly cited papers from top 49 publications of the world according to Google Scholar, which are arranged by Google Scholar according to h-index. Moreover, 7 additional journals having impact factor more than 28, which are not mentioned in those top 49 publications such as “Cancer Journal for Clinicians”, are also presented in the report with the list of 7 highly cited papers from each journal